The following interview is a conversation we had with Yingjun Wu, CEO and Co-Founder of RisingWave Labs, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $40 Million Raised to Make Stream Processing Simple, Affordable, and Accessible.
Yingjun Wu
Hey, how are you today?
Brett
I’m doing great. Thank you so much for asking, and thanks for being here. Super excited to chat.
Yingjun Wu
Cool. I really like to have a chance to talk to you.
Brett
Yeah. So to kick things off, let’s just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Yingjun Wu
Well, I’m the Founder of RisingWave Labs. So basically it’s a company, it’s a cersei company that invests the next generation SQL streaming database in the cloud. Well, I started a company in early 2021, and before running a company, I was a software engineer at AWS Redshift, the data warehouse, the cloud data warehouse built by AWS. And prior to that, I was in research at IBM. Research? Amadan And I opted my PhD from National University of Singapore and also spent a couple of months in Cashmere University. So my PhD was also about stream processing, and now I’m also doing stream processing. So over the last ten years, my entire life is about stream processing, database systems. Well, I’m also a frequent traveler, so, yeah, definitely I travel a lot for the work, but definitely also for fun. And I’ve been to probably 20 plus countries.
Yingjun Wu
Essentially, this Sunday I’ll be flying to Singapore, and next week I will be in London. So super fun.
Brett
What’s the craziest country you’ve ever traveled to?
Yingjun Wu
Indonesia. So Indonesia is a country in Southeast Asia, and it has amazing food and the beach is great, and it has a lot of fun riding a motorbike, you know, that’s good. The country is for motorbike and airlines for riding motorbike. So in a country you have to ride a motorbike and drive there. It’s crazy. I love it.
Brett
That’s awesome. And are you from Singapore or where are you from originally?
Yingjun Wu
I was originally from China, but I did my school in Singapore.
Brett
What was that like when you made that transition from China to Singapore? Was that a big life difference for you or what was that like?
Yingjun Wu
Well, I think it’s not a big difference because we’re still in Asia, right? It’s not like, okay, I moved from Asia to Europe, or I moved from Asia to, let’s say South America, right? It’s kind of big transition. But from China to Singapore. I think the lifestyle is similar, but definitely, I mean, Singapore is a nice country with nice people, and also I spend a great time there enjoying the food there. Yeah.
Brett
Nice. That’s very amazing. Now, a few questions that we like to ask just to better understand who you are as a Founder. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Yingjun Wu
Well, when you talk about the CEOs, I think probably the first few names come to me will be probably Elon Musk, all probably Steve Jobs. Right. Everyone talks about them. Right? Well, I think these two guys and also some other founders, NCOs, well, they are great people, and they are probably the world’s most innovative entrepreneurs. Right. And I like them a lot. But if you ask me something like, okay, if I have to pick one and only one Founder that I admire, then I would probably say Jeff Bezos from the other CEO of Amazon. Well, I mentioned Jeff Bezos not because I used to be an Amazon employee, I work for him, but because the way he leads the company. So you know that many founders will say that we have to beat our competitors. Right? We have to know the new feature quickly, and we probably need to develop some knowledge dots that no one has ever tried before.
Yingjun Wu
Right. That would be great. Right. And everyone should do that. I totally agree with them. But I think Amazon’s culture is a little bit different. So in Amazon, people care most about is to make customers happy, to be customer obsessed. Right. And Jeff actually mentioned a lot about, okay, you probably don’t need to focus too much about what your competitors have done, and you probably don’t need to care too much about the boss world rights and AI. A lot of things. Rockets. Right. All kinds of things we do not need to fix too much about. That the thing you should do, and the thing you should focus on is the customer. You should always put the customer first. And I believe that’s why Amazon can stand out and become one of the biggest and probably the greatest company in the planet. And I admire him a lot.
Yingjun Wu
And essentially, that’s how I lead a car company riding with Blast.
Brett
That’s amazing. Yeah, I love that. And as a consumer of Amazon, it’s just so clear how much they care about the customer. Every interaction you have with Amazon is a positive one. It adds a lot of value to their life. So it’s very real, their customer obsession. And I think that’s very unique. A lot of companies say they care about the customer, but then it’s like a shitty customer experience. So it’s not true. Amazon, it seems very consistent.
Yingjun Wu
That’s right.
Brett
And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And because you said Amazon here or Jeff Bezos before you can’t say the Everything store.
Yingjun Wu
Yeah, well, I mean, I read a lot of books. Well, the most recent book I read was a book called Gaunt Jam and Steel. In the book, it was actually a little book, and it was about the evolution of humans. I read this kind of book because I really love history, and we can always learn from history, right? Because history always repeat itself. But if you ask me about, okay, what books that have the greatest impact to me as a Founder, then I would like to say that it’d be the book called The Hard Things about Hard Things written by Ben Horowood. So I love this book because I not just treated a book. I mean, a startup book teaches you how to build a startup, but I really treat it as a reference because in this book the author actually mentioned a lot about the details.
Yingjun Wu
A lot of troubles you probably need to come from about how to hire people, how to file people, how to retain talents, how to control your customers expectations and how to treat your competitors, et cetera. So whenever I come from some problems and I probably do not really have the answer, I will refer to this book and I will check, okay, how this guy have it done and how the other people will fix their problem. So I really love this book, and I highly recommend this book. Nice.
Brett
Yeah, it’s such a great book, and I’ve read that a few times, and every time I’ve read it, I learned something new. So on the topic of history, I’m also super into history. My fiance teases me for it, but I’m a history nerd. My two favorite people in history are my first one is Napoleon, so he’s my favorite figure from history. Who is your favorite figure if you had to choose one person from history?
Yingjun Wu
Well, Napoleon is definitely great. Well, I think from well came to me. Well, I think will be Edison. Reason I choose him is that what he told me, is that failure is okay. Failure is not just a failure. Well, I mean, it’s actually the road that can lead to success. Think about how many times Edson has failed, right? I don’t know. Hundreds of times. Probably thousands of times. But he never gave up, right? So think about okay, every time I run into some troubles, every time I failed or made some troubles or confronting any issues, I will think about, okay, look, these people never give up, and these people always keep trying, right? Trying and trying. So, yeah, I like it. Nice.
Brett
I love that. Now let’s switch gears here and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So we call this segment the Pitch. So this is the elevator pitch, talking about the problem you’re solving, who you solve it for, and really what the product does. So let’s go for it. What’s the pitch behind what you do?
Yingjun Wu
So what we’re doing is SQL streaming database called a RisingWave Labs. So it’s essentially a database for stream processing. So think about the batch processing. Batch processing about, okay, you have a bunch of data and then you run a complex query there, right. Think about well, if you have a bank, it runs a query every single night so that you can see the result of yesterday, but you cannot see the result of, let’s say, last five minutes. So you cannot get a real time insight. So it’s really hard for people to make real time decisions based on real time data. Right. So, yeah, think about these banks. You have to wait for probably a day for the fresh results. Right, but the way do we do is stream processing. Stream processing means that it will refresh your result every time a new data comes in.
Yingjun Wu
So what do you mean that as a user, you will always receive the latest results based on the most recent data. So if you run a bank or if you run, let’s say, a fintech company, your customer do not need to wait for a long time to get a result. They do not need to just see, okay, what happened yesterday, they can just see, okay, what happened last five minutes, or probably just lost 10 seconds. So that case will help them to make a better decision. Yeah, that’s what we did. And what we build is cloud database, which means that you can just think about Snowflake, think about Redshift, think about the other cloud databases. We are one of them and we sell the product in the cloud. So as long as you have the Internet access, you can use our product and you can use our product to serve your business, to serve your real time application.
Yingjun Wu
Nice.
Brett
That’s super interesting. And take me back to the early days. So I believe I see the company started in 2021, is that correct?
Yingjun Wu
That’s right, yeah, early 21, essentially January.
Brett
Okay, so what was going on back then in those early days as you were just starting? What made you say all right, I’m leaving Amazon or I’m leaving AWS, and I’m going to go build RisingWave Labs. What was that transition like for you?
Yingjun Wu
Look, as I mentioned, I did my PhD in stream processing and database systems, and that was probably ten years ago. Five, up to ten years ago. And at the time, what I saw is that stream processing is great, but there are not too many chance, and those leading tech companies have already adopted stream processing. Right, and then I joined okay, it’s the first IBM and then moved to Amazon. In Amazon, I built AWS Redshift, which is one of the best data warehouse in the world. So what Redshift can do that? It can do batch processing. Basically, you have a huge amount of data and in redshift. You can just run a query, run a single query and then generate results. But it only provides people the still result. You can run query in Amazon every, let’s say every 6 hours or every 12 hours, right.
Yingjun Wu
But the result is not that fresh, it’s not real time result. So you cannot make real time decisions. Right, and that’s why I think that’s a problem. We can just reinvent stream processing and put a string processing in a cloud so that everyone can generate real time results in the cloud. And well, unfortunately, I don’t really think that AWS, Redshift can pivot to that direction. And I think that probably I should do something on my own. And that’s why I found this company that’s so amazing.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now, back today’s episode. Now let’s talk about growth. So are there any numbers you can share that just highlight some of the growth that you’re seeing today?
Yingjun Wu
Yeah, definitely will. So we checked telemetries, I just checked over the last four weeks, essentially 28 days, right. We got over 5000 deployments across the world, and we have over 100 long running clusters across the world. And we also have dozens of prospects using, trying to use our cloud product. And in GitHub we have, okay, probably 5000 stars. Yeah, that’s definitely a big number, right? So, yeah, these are the numbers.
Brett
Wow, very impressive. And what do you attribute to that growth? What are you getting right in your marketing and what are you doing to really capture the attention of potential customers?
Yingjun Wu
Well, the fun fact is that look, well, last year we don’t really have any marketing person and what we have is basically engineers, right? But we use rust. Rust is a trending programming language, right? Everyone is talking about, okay, I should build something new, rebuild something in Rust, and we build a system in Rust. And we actually gained a lot of attention from the Rust committee, but that was a year ago. And this year we actually spend more time on educating people about stream processing because what we heard is that essentially more and more company cares more about how to generate router main sites. And in the marketing side, we will tell people that, look, essentially you can use riding Wave to do such kind of thing. You can just use SQL because everyone knows SQL, everyone knows how to use SQL. And all SQL is also postgres style SQL.
Yingjun Wu
And basically every single developer knows how to use postgres, so there’s no learning curve. And that’s why we got a lot of traction and people which were directly shipped from their conventional database systems to our system to do stream processing. That’s how we gain traction.
Brett
Super interesting. And so far, what would you say has been your greatest go to market challenge and how have you overcome that challenge?
Yingjun Wu
I don’t know. Well, I mean, probably I face 100 challenges every single day. But if you’re asking about the biggest challenge, then I should say that for AWS, it is how to set our priorities. We have a lot of prospects and people because we are also open source software. RisingWave Labs is open source in GitHub and we actually get a lot of questions from the open source community as well as from our prospects. And every single people, every single user asking for different things. Some of users will ask about, okay, whether you can have integration with this system or that system, right? And some people will ask about, okay, I really need this feature when you can deliver this. And some people will ask, okay, do you have, let’s say, GCP support? Do you have Azure support? Right? There are so many questions and there are so many things we can do and there are so many features we need to develop.
Yingjun Wu
But our bandwidth, to be honest with kind of limited and we have just dozens of engineers, right? We cannot scale the team crazy. So we have to think about how to set a priority and what kind of problems we need to fix as early as possible and what kind of things we need to probably reconsider. I would like to say that’s the biggest challenge I’ve come from these days.
Brett
And if you reflect on your journey so far, what would you say is the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself if you were just starting the company again today from scratch?
Yingjun Wu
Talk to your customer early. Well, look, when I started a company, what I thought is that what I’m building is stream processing database system. Okay? Database system hasn’t been there for, let’s say 40, 50 or 60 years, right. And SQL is kind of standard, right at the time I saw that, okay, I don’t need to talk to your customers. I can probably just write a code and build a system. And after system is mature enough, I can talk to customers. But the thing is that if you do not really talk to customers, you don’t really know what a customer’s workload looks like and what customers true requirement looks like. Think about the integrations. I mean, people nowadays when people build systems, we have to build integrations with some other systems in the stream processing space as a streaming database. We have to build integration with messaging systems such as apache.
Yingjun Wu
Kafka. Apache. Paulza rapanda. And also we also need to build integrations with some data lakes like Hoodie, Iceberg, Delta. There are so many requirements. But if you do not really talk to your customers, what do you think is that I should support all of them, but at the end of the day, your bandwidth is limited and you feel that I probably cannot really finish all of them at once. So that’s why I feel that we should talk to customers early, as early as possible. Even if we just had an idea, we should talk to our customers what they really want and talk to them in detail. Don’t just talk to them about big ideas because if you just talk about the big ideas, they will say that it’s a cool idea and I fully support you. Talking about big idea doesn’t really work. You should talk to them about the details of your product even if you haven’t implemented it.
Yingjun Wu
So, yeah, talking to the customers first before launching the startup. Nice.
Brett
I love that. And final question here for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years from today, what’s the vision for the company?
Yingjun Wu
Well, I hope that our company will become the leading company one of the leading company in the stream processing domain because well, definitely we are working on stream processing and we believe that stream processing is a trend and more people really need real time result obtained from real time data. And we want to be focused within the next three to five years probably. We are not spin across different domains. We will not do AI and we are not do Aram. Right. People are talking about Aram and chatty BT nowadays. We are not do that. We will have focus. We’ll also be focusing on the customers and we hope that within the next three to five years when you talk to all customers, our customers should tell you that we are so customer obsessed and using all the products gives them great experience and that’s what I’m expecting.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, unfortunately, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap the interview here before we do. If people listening want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Yingjun Wu
Well, I mean, you can come to my Twitter account where I mean all link king. Well, I mean, pretty active in Twitter and linking. Yeah.
Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on to share your story and talk about everything that you’re building. This has been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot and I really enjoyed our conversation. So thank you so much for taking the time and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Yingjun Wu
Wow, thank you. Thanks for time.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast. Visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode. Search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.